Recommended French and Spanish Listening Media
- gregstignani
- Feb 19
- 2 min read
As promised in the previous post, this post will overview select sources I’ve found to be helpful for learning French or Spanish through listening. They all offer great exposure to a lot of vocabulary words in each episode, as well as a wide variety of subject matter to listen to. If you can, I would encourage listening to many different sources even if the topics aren’t especially interesting for you – just don’t make yourself listen to something uninteresting for a long time or spend any time at all on topics or sources you find outright boring.
Below are specific sources I recommend as helpful for listening to French or Spanish – try them out, but don’t be afraid to also explore for others that you might like!
Recommended French listening sources
- Category: Children’s
- Why I recommend: Medium speaking speed, commonly familiar topics and situations to provide context
- Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in English, transcripts available for reading the podcast words
- Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in French, slower speaking speed, transcripts available for reading the podcast words
- Category: Newscasts and Documentaries
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, faster speaking speed and more rapid switching between speakers
- Category: Newscasts and Documentaries
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in French
- Category: Documentaries
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, medium speaking speed, video to provide context
Recommended Spanish listening sources
- Category: Children’s
- Why I recommend: Medium speaking speed, commonly familiar topics and situations to provide context
- Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest
- Why I recommend: Beginner, intermediate, and advanced podcasts, transcripts available for reading the podcast words, other reading resources available
- Category: Politics and International Events
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, faster speaking speed, video to provide context, subtitles in Spanish
- Category: Newscasts and Documentaries
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, slower speaking speed
- Category: Newscasts and Documentaries
- Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, medium speaking speed, subtitles in Spanish
Conclusion
Each of these sources has different strengths and different challenge levels. Some will be more enjoyable and useful for you from the beginning, and others might be better after you’ve developed some degree of mastery in your target language. Choose topics you find interesting to help sustain your motivation, and feel free to bounce around between different sources. What’s important is to continue learning at a sustainable pace through a reliable, effective process. Listening to a podcast or watching a video for twenty minutes each day leads to a lot of learning and progress if you are focused and make those twenty minutes high quality learning time!
As always, when listening to the news and documentaries (even in English), watch out for your source’s bias or viewpoint and how that affects the way they present information to you!
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